Sandra tests - WD drives

[invertedflight]

Hello,

I have 4 WD hard drives right now - just got a new 180gig drive. They all have 8MB cache's: two WD800JB's, a WD1200JB, and my new WD1800JB - all ordered from newegg within the past 9 months.
I had some problems right away with this new drive (errors when writing and reading to/from it), so I decided to try a benchmarking program, and found Sandra. I was wondering if someone could tell me what range of values I should get when using Sandra's hard drive benchmarking utility. My first three drives seem to be landing around 22,000 to 25,000kB/s while my new drive gets a screaming 7,000kB/s. All tests were done with drives a little over half full, and completely defragmented (winxp pro, abit at7 mobo).

Thanks,
Chris

[osprey4]

Here's a bump for your question. I'd be curious to see the answer if anyone has any input. I'm trying to figure out why my new Maxtor drive is running a bit slow.

[Tomteriffic]

Check to see that you have the correct drivers installed for the drive controllers, both primary and secondary. Sounds to me like the new one is running in "real mode" using default drivers.

I had this problem on an Intel chipset board until I installed the "Intel busmaster Ultra ATA Storage driver" on both the controller root, as well as the primary and secondary controllers.

Oh, got DMA enabled on the new drive?

[Wakeboarder141]

I have dual WD 8mb 120gb drives. My D: comes it at around 27k and my C: which has windows on it comes it at around 17k.

[osprey4]

Wakeboarder, is that the sisoft sandra reported value? Does your machine seem to run OK?

[Wakeboarder141]

That is what Sandra says, yes. My machine has had performance problems since I installed this motherboard and cpu. Still haven't quite narrowed down what could be causing it, but I don't think those scores are the problem.

[Xaotic]

Sandra is notoriously bad for HDD benchmarks, try either ATTO or HDTach for more accurate results.

ATTO
http://www.attotech.com/software/app1.html

HDTach
http://www.tcdlabs.com/hdtach.htm
Must be registered version for NTFS

A bit of further configuration information would be handy. Since there are 4 drives, are you running a controller card, have the RAID chipset onboard or have no CD drives? Is the HDD running as master or slave on it's channel and is it alone on the channel? Have you tried changoing the drive to a different IDE header? Have you tried changing the IDE cable? Since you are in XP, go into Computer Management > Device Manager > expand the IDE controllers > right click to properties and check the Advanced Settings Tab to determine the UDMA mode for the device. Also, XP can throttle down the drives if CRC errors are ocurring, if the UDMA mode shows lower than 5(provided that's what's indicated by BIOS on boot), check the Event Viewer > System for CRC errors. Provided these are ocurring, run the WD diagnostics on the drive itself, available here:

http://support.wdc.com/download/

If that doesn't show errors, then the chipset on the board or controller is probably bad and prepare for an RMA.